How the Cat Town Café furthers our Rescue Mission

Cat Town began as an all-volunteer foster-based rescue organization in 2011. As shelter volunteers, we saw that cats at the Oakland shelter who were scared, sick or older, or traumatized by having just lost their homes, rarely made it into adoption and were even less likely to be taken by a rescue group.

Having started first with the hardest-to-place cats, we’ve helped over 600 at-risk cats who were considered “unadoptable” in a shelter environment.

With the Cafe, we’re able to expand our mission to find homes for cats who aren’t harder to place, but who are competing for space at the busy open-admission Oakland shelter, especially during summer and fall when the shelter receives hundreds of displaced kittens.

The Cafe allows us to not only empty more cages, but allow the cats who remain at the Oakland shelter to get more attention from volunteers, stay healthier, and have more opportunity for quicker adoptions with fewer cats and kittens competing for attention.